The Cost of Ideological Conformity

It doesn't just narrow your coalition; it can prompt a counter-formation

Me, in 2016, behind a misleading chyron

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In the early 2010s, I started writing for The American Conservative, a magazine co-founded by Pat Buchanan. At the time, I was an odd fit for the magazine in most ways. Apart from the fact that I was much more socially and economically liberal than most of the readership of that magazine, and that I was not opposed to immigration (restrictionism being a core belief of the founders), back when I had been more of a right-winger I was functionally a neoconservative, and the magazine was founded explicitly to oppose neoconservatism. So what was I doing there?

Well, as I said in my first post on my blog for TAC, I’d changed my mind about two big things over the course of the 2000s: neoconservative foreign policy and the role of finance in the economy. Those just happened to be two of the key issues that TAC was founded to oppose. So there was some logic to my putting my shoulder to their wheel. But the other big thing was that they asked me to write for them even though they knew that I didn’t agree with their readership or their leadership on many other issues. And they promised that I would be allowed to write whatever I wanted even if it traduced core convictions of those who edited, funded or subscribed to the magazine. So I joined, and I had a very congenial time there for many years.

I usually tell this story by way of explaining what made TAC so interesting in its heyday, and how valuable it is for an intellectual publication to take a “big tent” approach to their masthead. Most important, my experience at TAC demonstrates that is totally possible to accumulate a diverse array of voices without winding up lacking an identity.

But that’s a story about them. There’s another part to that story: the part about me. Sure, I can tell a story about how I wound up there that is all about having turned against the premises of the Iraq War and grown deeply skeptical of the role of finance. But I could have gone to any number of other outlets that were always against the Iraq War, always skeptical of finance, and where the general outlook was more in line with mine on any number of other issues where I had become an ordinary liberal. Why go to TAC instead of one of those places? What was it about me—or about those other places—that made me prefer TAC?

I don’t have a simple answer, but I do think that one part of it is that in turning against neoconservatism I was also turning against ideology as such as an organizing principle. And ideology is an organizing principle at a lot of outlets—explicitly at most journals of opinion, implicitly at most mainstream publications. Indeed, even at places that try to hire writers with diverse perspectives, the goal is often to get writers who can fill different ideological slots, so that the readership can hear from a representative cross-section of the opinion landscape. And I just wasn’t very reliably representative of anything; indeed, I didn’t want to be reliably representative of anything. So part of what appealed to me about TAC was that they not only weren’t that, they were founded in opposition to that, in opposition to the transformation of conservatism during the Bush years from a coalition to a unified ideology that adherents were expected to endorse tout court. That orientation mattered more to me than how much we agreed on, substantively.

I’ve been thinking about that fact apropos of this edition of The Upshot from The New York Times, describing the six types of Republican voters. I’m kind of a sucker for these typologies, even though I know they are always questionable, and I probably liked this one in part because it conformed to my preexisting assumptions about how the GOP is divided up—with one important exception. The “Moderate Establishment” are basically sociological Republicans who are almost completely out of step with the party as it exists, and will probably eventually all leave. “Traditional Conservatives” are the folks we think of as “normal” Republicans, while the “Right Wing” are the venerable breed of American paranoiacs (though there seem to be a lot more of them these days than there used to be). “Blue Collar Populists” would have been called “Reagan Democrats” forty years ago, though many of their current representatives in the GOP coalition are probably too young to have been counted as such back then, and “Libertarian Conservatives” are a long-established ideological subculture. None of those descriptions or the sizes of their groups surprised me.

But the last, smallest and newest group, the “Newcomers” did. They’re not social conservatives or racial conservatives. They’re not that populist on economics, or even that anti-establishment. They score high on the “isolationism” score, and I’ll come back to that, but even that isn’t so defining since Libertarians, Blue Collar Populists and the Right Wing all score higher. They’re young, racially diverse, and pretty liberal across the board; in general they would get on fine as moderate Democrats. Except that their defining characteristic is being anti-woke.

That struck me as somewhat extraordinary. I’ve generally thought of “wokeness” as a post-material political persuasion—that is to say, the kinds of people who define their politics by their wokeness are people who don’t have more pressing material needs to attend to. That’s certainly how Matt Yglesias sees them, though he doesn’t use the term. He describes a growing tendency on the left—very much including the center left—to treat certain commitments as sacrosanct and not subject to debate or compromise; you simply have to agree with certain views, or you are outside of the realm of acceptable discourse. Drawing those kinds of lines, though, tells people who don’t agree that they aren’t welcome. They might still form coalitions with you out of mutual interest—identity-oriented groups have certainly done the same—except that the woke stance also lets them know that their issues, the economic ones where they may agree with Democrats, are the ones that will be compromised if push comes to shove. Which is why Yglesias says that “the uncompromising moral stand is more appealing if you are not personally counting on Medicaid expansion to make a concrete difference in your life.”

If wokeness is a post-material political orientation, though, then anti-wokeness must be even more post-material—and for a liberal to cite anti-wokeness as the reason to affiliate with Republicans makes little sense even in terms of post-material identity-based voting. How could people like that represent 8% of the GOP coalition? It’s one thing to be anti-woke if you disagree with the views of most Democrats; then it’s just a way—a totally legitimate way, I might add—of explaining why left-wingers have gotten more dangerous than they used to be, whether because they are more extreme, more fundamentally illiberal, or whatever. But if you agree with Democrats on a host of issues, have little in common with any of the other segments of the Republican coalition, and yet affiliate strongly with Republicans primarily because of anti-wokeness—well, that sounds not just post-material but spiteful and perverse. Isn’t it?

And then I remembered my experience at TAC.

My choosing to write for TAC was an affiliation, and it was a post-material choice to some extent in that I wasn’t trying to maximize my immediate material remuneration. I was voting for Barack Obama and for congressional Democrats while writing for TAC, but my writing was probably the more important affiliation in terms of having any influence on the world, limited as it might have been. That’s especially so when you remember that I vote in New York. For most people, rationally, voting and party membership are also more matters of affiliation and identity than of policy preferences. How different, then, is “I agree with Democrats about a lot of issues, but I don’t like being told what I have to think or who I have to be, so I registered and vote as a Republican” from “I agree with Democrats about a lot of issues, but I’d rather write for an outlet that doesn’t expect me to toe an ideological line, so I joined The American Conservative?” Not very, I would argue.

I left TAC when new editorial leadership started steering the magazine in a more ideologically-coherent direction. Even if I’d agreed with that direction, which I didn’t, I wouldn’t have liked being steered. The same thing might happen with these Newcomers—they might discover before too long that the scope for disagreement in the GOP is much less than they had imagined, and find themselves looking for a new political home.

But the opposite might also occur: they might change their views and become more conservative as they rub elbows with their new neighbors on the right. Indeed, they might already be primed for that by the way in which the left increasingly promotes their own causes, particularly the ones that don’t have a bread-and-butter dimension. I noted that the Newcomers scored relatively high on “isolationism,” and while I’m not sure what that word is supposed to mean in this context, the most salient foreign policy issue at the moment is American military support for Ukraine against Russian aggression. I can’t help but wonder whether the superficial moralism with which that cause has been advanced on the center-left, and the signifiers thereof—putting a Ukrainian flag in one’s profile and that sort of thing—might have had the effect of turning people without strong prior opinions on Ukraine, but with a strong distrust of both that moralism and that kind of virtue-signaling, against the underlying cause itself. If so, that might well happen with other issues, and wind up being a mechanism by which people whose liberal views are weakly held become more conservative over time once they have made the decision to affiliate with the GOP as a matter of identity.

That, I suspect, is the biggest risk in enforcing ideological conformity: not only do you turn off people who disagree, you might drive away and even change the minds of people who agree. If 8% of the Republican coalition is actually affiliating with the GOP just because they are infuriated by that characteristic of the contemporary left, then the phenomenon is already big enough to be costing the Democrats crucial elections. If that doesn’t prompt a rethinking, I don’t know what would.